


Electronics Repaired at Reasonable Prices

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Repair Shop AU, college-age characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 15:05:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12707385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: She comes in every Thursday night with a broken gadget for him to repair. There's no way they're all hers. Cisco wants to know what she's up to.





	Electronics Repaired at Reasonable Prices

**Author's Note:**

> Today’s NaNo story comes from a prompt that @fabledshadow wanted: “No! Don’t hurt them! Hurt me, leave them alone!” for Killervibe. Thanks!
> 
> Inspiration also came from the fact that I’ve gotten my phone screen repaired not once but twice in the past month, sob sob sob.

When the bell over the shop door rang, Cisco almost broke something getting out of the back room to the counter, where the cute brunette with the CCU t-shirt waited. “Hi,” she said. “I’m here to get - ”

“- a screen repaired,” he said. “Yeah, I know. Just like last week, and the week before - how many weeks?”

She blushed. “A lot?”

Her name was Caitlin Snow, he knew from running her credit card every week. She volunteered at the hospital down the street, got off work at six-thirty on Thursdays, and was usually at Starlabs Repair by quarter to seven.

He grinned, holding his hand out for this week’s patient. “What do you do to your electronics? Play soccer? Throw darts? Or do you just, like, hurl them on the ground every chance you get?”

She handed him the phone. It was a sad case. The screen wasn’t just cracked, it had been _smashed._ The glass looked like a spiderweb. “These are ridiculously delicate screens.”

“I know,” he said. “And I keep trying to get you to spring for the screen protectors, and you never do, and then the next week you’re back.” And he looked forward to Thursday night all damn week. “Seriously, are you some kind of technological sadist?” He cooed over the phone, petting it. “What did the bad girl do to you, poor little Samsung?”

“I don’t - they’re very delicate!”

He held it away from her, whimpering, “No! Don’t hurt them! Hurt me, leave them alone!”

“Actually, these, um, aren’t all mine.”

“You don’t say,” he said dryly, flipping the phone over to record the serial numbers. As he suspected, they were completely different than anything else in her customer file.

She’d brought in iPhones, iPads, every form of Android phone and tablet known to man, two Kindle Fires, and even a Nook tablet. He didn’t know anybody used the Nook anymore. He’d had to look that one up.

Sometimes they needed new batteries or the headphone jack fixed, but the vast majority of the time it was a cracked touchscreen. Which wasn’t surprising. She was right; they were ridiculously delicate for gadgets that got so much use. For as much as people paid for them, you’d think the manufacturers would have invented tougher screens by now.

But then this little repair shop wouldn’t be in business, and Cisco would be out of a job that let him play with electronics, study when it was slow, and flirt with an adorable brunette every Thursday night between six-forty-five and closing time.

His boss had said, “She’s probably stealing them up at the college, getting the broken ones fixed, and selling them on eBay.” But he’d been forced to admit that probably wasn’t the case when Cisco had looked up all the serial numbers and none of them were reported stolen.

“So this one will be an hour,” he said, although she probably could have given him the time estimate herself by now.

“Okay,” she said, and wandered around until she found her usual stool. Dragging it back to the repair counter, she hopped up to perch, like his very own cute repair mascot.

“Tell me, if they’re not all yours,” he said as he pulled out all the things he would need, “whose are they?”

She shrugged. “They belong to, um, friends.”

“You either have a lot of friends or your friends are all super clumsy.”

“Well, I told a few people I knew a great place with really good prices to fix a screen, and I guess word got around.”

He reached under the counter and pulled out a flyer. “I bet this helped get the word around.”

The flyer was bare-bones. No graphics or interesting fonts. Just the words, “cracked screen? bad battery? Call CAITLIN. Electronics repaired at reasonable prices.” The fanciest thing she’d done was to add those little tear-off tabs at the bottom with her phone number. A few of them were already gone.

Her mouth fell open.

“So this is you,” he said.

“I - I only put those up in the Biomed building,” she stuttered. “You said you were in the Engineering program.”

“I was there with a friend and I noticed it.” He shook his head at her. “Girl, chill. I ain’t even mad. I might be a little impressed. You’re bringing in business, you’re getting a little off the top for yourself, it’s the American way.”

“But I - ”

“So how much are you charging on top of our price? Like twenty dollars? Thirty dollars?”

“I’m not,” she said.

“Okay, maybe fifteen dollars.”

“No,” she said. “I charge them what you charge me. They could come here themselves and get it done. It doesn’t seem to fair to make them pay more.”

His hands paused over the Samsung in surgery. “You’re telling me that you’re serving as an ambulance for sick phones purely out of the goodness of your heart?” Shit. He’d been pretty sure she was a rich girl, but this sealed it. Only someone who’d never had to think about money would do something that stupid.

She shrugged. “Sometimes they say keep the change, but I’ve never gotten more than ten dollars that way.”

He put his tools right down. “Then why?”

She hooked her foot around the crossbar of the stool and hunched her head down. “It - I - it’s a good excuse to come here. And. Um. To see you.”

She was red all the way to her hairline.

He wanted to laugh. He also wanted to kiss her. He also, also wanted to stick his head out the door and yell, “Hey, everyone, a really cute girl made up a ridiculously complicated scheme just to have a plausible excuse to hang out with me, all y'all can suck it!”

He didn’t do any of those. Instead, he said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just, you know, come and hang out?”

“But you’re working,” she said. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“First of all, my boss is never here. Second, I exist outside of these four walls,” he reminded her. “Look, it’s not that hard to say, ‘Hey, you wanna hang out sometime?’”

Her expression reminded him of a butterfly pinned to a board. He began to wonder if she was just boosting her ego with him, enjoying the flirting, but unwilling to actually cultivate anything around people she knew.

He pressed his lips together and bent his head over the phone again.

“Well,” she said, and he looked up. “Do you? Want to hang out sometime?”

“Yeah,” he said, relief spreading through his stomach. “I really would.”

She smiled.

He waved the tools at her. “Just do me a favor, would you? Start charging those dumb college kids extra for this, if you keep doing it. You’re providing a service. You’re the one schlepping their phones out here every week and putting it on your credit card and waiting for them to pay you back. Get yours, girl.”

She chewed her lip. “Maybe a ten dollar service charge,” she said.

He shook his head. Definitely raised rich. “It’s a start.”

FINS


End file.
